This invention relates to a language processing dictionary for use in a language processing machine, which may be a machine translating system.
A "dictionary" plays various roles in language processing. In a word processor of the type which is widely used in Japan, a dictionary is used in search of Chinese characters and keeps items or entries as indices, each in a kana description and/or a Roman-script spelling for one or a few Chinese characters. In "Kyodo Press," Tokyo, Japan, a Roman script to Chinese and kana script conversion system is in use. An electronic digital computer of a medium scale, NEC 2200/150, is used in combination with a magnetic disk which serves as a dictionary file. The dictionary file keeps word units which have increased in number from 13,000 to about 25,000. The system successfully converts 98.degree./o of political and financial news sent from abroad in Roman script of the Japanese language.
In a language understanding machine, a dictionary is used which keeps superficial descriptions and descriptions of morphemes, syntaxic information, and conceptional or semantic information. In a language translating system wherein language analysis and generation must be carried out dictionaries are used not only in finding an output conceptional description or symbol from an input morphemic expression but also an output morphemic description from an input conceptional expression. In multilingual machine translation wherein one of at least two languages may be an artifical language as, for example, a machine language, such dictionaries are necessary for each language pair. Inasmuch as it is impossible to use a conventional dictionary bidirectionally between morphemic and conceptional expressions, the machine translating systems have been considerably complicated. Furthermore, a conventional dictionary is undesiredly redundant due to synonyms in the manner which will later be exemplified. This makes it difficult to use the conventional dictionary as a thesaurus.